An attorney and a judge, bitter enemies, arrive at an elevator at the same time. They argue over who gets to ride down, then scuffle. Police arrest the attorney, who slaps a restraining order on the judge.

Sounds like a lame lawyer joke. But no. The flap occurred recently at Social Security's customarily sedate hearing office in downtown Portland, the climactic moment in a testy three-year war of words between a disability claims attorney and an administrative law judge.

Some lawyers who argue cases in Portland's Social Security hearing office snickered into their sleeves over the elevator set-to. But not all were amused.

Disability claims lawyer Alan Graf says "making a circus" of an institution designed to assist the disabled is a distraction from serious public service work.

Social Security's bureaucracy often makes disabled Americans endure bitter, years-long fights for benefits that are rightfully theirs. But that rancor seldom spills over into the kind of public spectacle seen March 31 at an elevator in Duncan Plaza.

Starting out friendly

Meet the combatants.

Judge Dan R. Hyatt, a 60-year-old Navy veteran, is squarely built, about 5-foot-7, with a white mustache. He earned the Bronze Star for combat heroism in Vietnam and labored as a military trial lawyer. He's known as a stern judge who demands deference and gives no quarter to unprepared lawyers.

Daniel A. Bernath, also a 60-year-old Navy veteran, stands 6-foot-2 and weighs 240 pounds. He has a gray beard and uses a cane or crutches to get around. He's a former radio reporter who has worked 25 years as a lawyer. Competitors call him a crank, a chronic whiner and client poacher, although he differs about such characterizations.

Five years before their tiff on the lift, Bernath went to work as a clerk in the same office that employed Hyatt. They were friendly, but scarcely friends. Hyatt thought Bernath childish for posting names of Navy ships on file carts, which the lawyer says livened up a dry office.

Portland Social Security cases lag

Social Security's Portland hearing office remains one of the slower in the nation in deciding the cases of people who have appealed denials of their disability benefits.

The office, formally known as the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, has taken an average of 515 days this year from the time judges hear cases until they sign opinions -- more than two months longer than the national average.

That delay is an improvement from last year, when the Portland office took 652 days to decide cases.

Across the nation, nearly 700,000 Americans await decisions on their disability appeals. Many are so sick they are likely to die before getting a ruling.

The Social Security Administration employs nearly 1,300 administrative law judges to hear their cases. A corps of 30,000 active claimant representatives -- most of them lawyers -- appear before the judges with clients seeking disability benefits.

The hearings are supposed to be non-adversarial. But some claimant reps complain there's a natural tension between them and some of the judges.

A key reason for that tension, they say, is that judges perform conflicting roles: they look out for the claimant while protecting the public funds that pay disability benefits.

On Oct. 18, 2005, about 14 months after he went to work for Social Security, Bernath quit to become a claimant representative. Soon he took clients before some of the judges for whom he once toiled to help them get disability benefits.

Bernath advertised on TV and in The Oregonian, telling customers, "You have a right to switch lawyers." Other attorneys bristled when Bernath filched their clients, a breach of etiquette known as poaching.

The lawyer also filed Oregon State Bar complaints against some of his competitors -- some posted to his website, oregonshyster.com -- and soon found himself persona non grata to other claimant reps.

Bernath says competitors were envious because he outhustled them, signing 2,600 disability claimants in four years.

Lawyer Dick Sly, who says he faced some of Bernath's "frivolous" bar complaints (all dismissed), remains angry. Sly says he's never met Bernath and sees no upside in locking horns with him now.

"It's kind of like fighting with your wife," he says. "The consequences you will bear forever."Questions from the judge

On Feb. 21, 2007, Bernath brought a client named Barry Moody before Hyatt to appeal his denial of disability pay. But the judge disregarded Moody, instead quizzing Bernath about his veracity.

"You've never been suspended from the California Bar?"

"Absolutely," Bernath said.

Hyatt believed the lawyer was lying to him, because he recalled Bernath telling him the California Bar had once suspended his license. The judge asked Bernath if he'd ever been disciplined there, and the lawyer said never. So Hyatt got him to swear to that under oath, then quickly closed the hearing.

Bernath was not a member of the Oregon State Bar, and Social Security does not require claimant representatives to be lawyers. But Hyatt took a CD recording of the 11-minute proceeding to a bar investigator anyway, evidence, he says, of Bernath's dishonesty.

Bernath's California law license was suspended in 1995 because he failed to pay child support, records show. But that was a regulatory action, rather than a disciplinary one, according to a bar spokeswoman. However, Bernath denies he was ever suspended, saying, "I was voluntarily inactive."

The Oregon Board of Bar Examiners had seen things differently. In 1997, the panel denied him admission to practice here because he failed to disclose his California suspension. The Oregon Supreme Court upheld that denial: "The record contains overwhelming evidence that applicant does not possess (the) requisite good moral character and fitness to be a practicing attorney in Oregon."

The opinion noted other accusations by bar examiners: Bernath destroyed all his California case files and once carried a concealed weapon into a deposition. But Bernath says he destroyed no original files and held a permit for the weapon.

After Hyatt complained to the bar, Bernath became a frequent filer at the Oregon State Bar. In 2008 and 2009, he filed six complaints against the judge, all dismissed, and obtained other lawyers' complaints against Hyatt. In a letter to tax officials, he suggested Hyatt cheated on his taxes.

Bernath posted many of the accusations on oregonshyster.com. In recent years, the site has accused Hyatt of lies, cruelty and racism, once lampooning him as a hooded Ku Klux Klansman with a Social Security emblem on his chest.

One of Bernath's bar complaints, which accused Hyatt of revealing Moody's Social Security number to the Oregon Bar, was dismissed. But it got traction with Social Security.

The agency's chief judge, Frank Cristaudo, wrote to the Merit Systems Protection Board that Hyatt had flagrantly disregarded three agency rules: releasing a claimant's private information, filing a bar complaint against a practicing lawyer, and giving inaccurate statements to bar investigators.

Cristaudo proposed to suspend Hyatt for 30 days, but the judge fought it. The case settled last summer when Hyatt agreed to a suspension in exchange for withdrawal of Social Security's charges, according to records obtained by The Oregonian.

Two years ago, Hyatt recused himself from hearing Bernath's cases. The judge found him too hostile. So did an expert witness in disability cases, who complained to agency officials about the lawyer's temper last spring. She provided her complaint to The Oregonian on condition she not be named, saying she feared Bernath.

"His outbursts are unprovoked, explosive, and disproportionate to the proceedings," she wrote. "He appears to have difficulty gaining control once his emotions escalate, and the escalation is rapid."

Social Security now places a Federal Protective Service inspector or security guard in hearings attended by Bernath.

Asked about the extra security, Bernath says he assumed the guards were protecting him from Hyatt. The lawyer says he sent Hyatt's bosses three letters in 2007 and 2008 seeking protection from the judge.

Hyatt says he went out of his way to avoid Bernath. "The last thing I'd want," he says, "is an altercation with him."

The altercation

On the morning of March 31, Bernath walked out of a disability hearing, client in tow, and approached elevators on the fourth floor of Duncan Plaza. He moved for the doors of an open elevator using a cane and a rolling file box as crutches. Hyatt, heading downstairs, stood alone in the car.

What happened next remains in dispute.

Bernath says a man he didn't recognize rushed to the front of the elevator. He says the man put his hands on his hips, shouted "No!" and told the lawyer he couldn't get on. Bernath says the man then chest-butted him and, as the lawyer started to fall backward, roughly butted him again with his chest and belly, shouting, "Get the police, this man just assaulted me."

Only later, says Bernath, did he learn the man was Hyatt. He recalls a Federal Protective Service inspector asking him for a statement, which he declined on his lawyer's standing advice.

Hyatt describes Bernath's version of the story as "fantasy." The judge says Bernath ran to the elevator, used his cane to block the doors from closing, then roughly chest-butted him. He says Bernath then refused to move away until a security guard pulled him off, shouting, "Are you arresting me?"

Bernath was handcuffed and cited for disorderly conduct.

On April 2, two days after the elevator incident, Bernath petitioned Washington County Circuit Court for a restraining order against Hyatt. The lawyer wrote that he was afraid of him after their elevator dust-up.

Judge Suzanne Upton pored over the petition, which included a copy of Bernath's disabled-parking permit and Veterans Affairs papers showing he's 90 percent disabled due to post-traumatic stress disorder and neurological problems.

The petition named Hyatt, but did not mention he was a judge or that Bernath was arrested as the instigator of the elevator fracas.

"Can I understand better, who is Mr. Hyatt?" Upton asked. "Is he just a person out there, or ..."

"No," Bernath said. "He's like a co-worker ... at one time."

"No one should be treated this way," Upton told Bernath, "and especially someone that has served their country and is disabled from it and is vulnerable to (being) tipped over."

Upton granted Bernath's order, which forbade Hyatt from entering the lawyer's home or workplace. While Bernath says he considers Duncan Plaza his place of work, it happens to be Hyatt's office. This meant that, once served with the restraining order, Hyatt couldn't enter his own workplace.

Upton now says it didn't occur to her that a person described as a "co-worker" was a judge or that the address Bernath listed as his workplace was a federal office.

The government intervened on Hyatt's behalf, moving the restraining order to Portland's federal court, a move challenged by Bernath's lawyer. Assistant U.S. Attorney Adrian Brown later filed papers to quash the restraining order, saying Bernath had been "less than candid" with Upton about Hyatt's position and workplace.

Bernath faces a hearing on the disorderly conduct charge Friday before a U.S. magistrate.

Notices of intent to sue

News of the latest Bernath-Hyatt scrape livened up a daily e-mail forum of Oregon claimant representatives, says moderator Linda Ziskin. But she says e-mails rained much harder on Bernath, whose antics are viewed with amusement tempered by disgust.

Weeks before, Social Security had served Bernath with papers notifying him of its intention to bar him as a claimant rep. Hyatt says the agency is considering more than 50 incidents of the lawyer's "assaultive, inappropriate and unethical behavior" over a two-year period, none of which included him.

Such characterizations infuriate JoEllen Shannon, a 61-year-old former nun who handles some of Bernath's cases on contract. Shannon acknowledges Bernath has an intense personality but says he's a good mentor and tough negotiator.

"His intelligence and strength unfortunately have been misinterpreted," she says.

Shannon was dismayed recently to spy a flier on the wall of Salem's hearing office with a photo of Bernath and text reading something like, "Have you seen this man?" Shannon thought it unseemly of Social Security to put up a "wanted poster."

Bernath says he never behaved improperly in Social Security hearings and that all he's ever done is give hope to clients left discouraged by an agency that wants them to give up before they get disability pay.

"Because I'm a good advocate, and an irritant, they are trying to take away my law practice," he says.

Late last month, Bernath filed two notices that he intends to sue Social Security and Hyatt for the judge's actions. One claim seeks $2 million for coercion, alleging that Hyatt promised to recuse himself from hearing Bernath's cases if the lawyer removed references to him from his Web site. The other seeks $10 million in compensation for injuries and emotional distress he claims Hyatt inflicted on him.

The judge chuckled at this.

"I think we're just going to have to let justice run its course," he says. "I'm not going to go shielding my assets."